Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

More or less. It's going to hit green (75+) on Metacritic by the end, I feel. Best chance, it scrapes 78-80.

Frontiers got a 71, but I feel strongly that it's because of the few but significantly negative reviews it got, like 2-3/10s. Otherwise, it would've been with Colors and Generations.

The worst reviews for Superstars so far says pretty much everything the most negative impressions say of the game and it's still 5s and 6s.

One thing I noticed about Sonic games that generally considered "good" by critics and the audience is that they have more positive (75+) reviews than mixed or negative, with more mediocre games being more mixed.

 

MC score has gone up to 74 now. Sonic MC scores tend to go down so seeing where the score ends up will be interesting!

 

For what it's worth, TSS gave it a 4/5. I'm not super-concerned with what it looks like to critics since we know it's not a steaming pile of garbage, but knowing at least one group of legacy fans thinks it's solid puts me in good spirits.

Sounds like the OST is all over the place, though. Not excited to find out the "placeholder tracks" were nothing of the sort (other than white park, obviously), and apparently the game has several different pieces using the Sonic 4 style. I guess I'll tolerate it as long as the rest are as good as what we've seen so far?

 

Don't see it going higher than mid 70's tbh.

But yea that tracks; the "best" Sonic games tend to be somewhere in the ranges of 70, whereas the worse ones are significantly lower.

So if Frontiers is a C-, Superstars will probably be a C or C+.

Both games cater to different fans; Classic fans are clearly more welcoming to Superstars and Modern fans towards Frontiers.

But outside the fanbase, both games will probably just be seen as average, with Superstars being slightly above.

 

I'd trust that 4/5 over most critic scores tbh. I'm anticipating a classicish Sonic game that doesnt do much new, including bad difficulty spikes and weird jarring moments like the classics.

 

Honestly I’d be happy to live in a world where 7/10 is the baseline expectation for Sonic games. When’s the last time this franchise really had any consistency with regards to its quality? Granted, Frontiers isn’t the most technically polished game, but provided a fun experience for the most part and I think 7/10 is entirely fair to it. Superstars seems to be a more technically solid game (in single player), albeit a safer one, so I think it could end up settling on the cusp between 7/10 and 8/10. If Sonic Team can keep that kind of output up for the next few titles, I’d like to hope they then get the space to really breathe with these projects. I read yesterday that there was no deadline for Super Mario Wonder and, honestly, I think a similar approach should be afford to Sonic if he’s to truly recapture his former stature in the gaming landscape.

 

2010-2013

Colors up until Lost World.

 

With Jun on the list of composers, I expected the OST to be all over the place. I'm grateful he's not the sole composer, and I hope he's sufficiently called out in regards to where his music stands in comparison to others for a classic title. He needs to drop his Sonic 4 mindset and adapt.

 

Honestly if he didn't get a hint during Sonic 4 itself (and there were lots of pretty loud and clear hints from what I remember) I don't think he ever will.

 

Jun definitely got word from SEGA to make things less Sonic 4.

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, and it's really not much of a run. Two console games with an allgedly aight DS game and an a mediocre 3DS game. I guess we got ASRT if you count that.

 

We eatin good.

 

2 contrasting reviews that nicely balance out the perspectives.

Of course, a lot of them have been pointing out the same problems we've been discussing for weeks.

I'm going to be honest. I've played the game a good bit now. I like it. I think the Unity engine and the possible lack of Denuvo means the fans will 'really' have some wild fun with it, so that's making me decide to 'keep' my PC pre-order intact after I was hesitating.

However...

I don't think this game is worth full price either. I just don't. They try to put value in the battle mode and co-op that, at least with the former, does seem like it will be somewhat fun at times... but is also not much of a time investment either and I suspect will die off pretty quickly on most platforms.

The classics are some of my all time favorites, but Sonic Mania fell slightly short, and I waited 6 years under the hopes that we'd get a sequel that improves on them with a similar team. This is what we got and... it wasn't actually that worth the wait, I'm afraid. It improves on some small aspects but lost a lot else, regressing to being somewhere around the quality of Sonic 1 if I really want to keep it ranked with the classics.

This perfectly falls into the camp of "if you must have classic sonic gameplay now, it's not a bad way to experience it", but "if you want to wait, you should probably wait for the price drop". If you want to buy it at full price to support the IP? I won't judge that either.

Best of luck, friends. Hopefully we all get a lot out of the game next week.

 

The power of lower standards and expectations

 

For whatever reason I'm mildly surprised that boss fights are a consistent complaint by reviewers. Mainly because from the earlier bosses that were shown, they had similar designs to Mania (limited windows to attack) but took even less hit points to go down, which I thought was the tradeoff. But then I recalled the bosses for the later stages of the game (especially the final boss); which can easily be explained as "the developers didn't know when to stop." They really need to change their approach to designing bosses; put the S3&K approach back on the shelf and return to making one boss per zone. Although bringing back bosses with active hitboxes that can be regularly attacked (like in Sonic 1/2) would work wonders as well.

Those complaints, coupled with a few reviews also complaining about (still) losing all of your rings in one hit...I remember when I said a couple of months ago that they should had taken the Unleashed route of only halving rings lost per hit (but also being unable to recollect lost rings), and was met with the rebuttal that it would had made the game too easy. *shrug*

It's funny, boss design and old-school difficulty were among of the bigger complaints about Mania besides the reused content; for all of Superstars wanting to be classic gameplay modernized for a mainstream audience, they completely missed the boat on these elements. Simply cutting out lives isn't a free ticket towards making gameplay easier/more accessible for modern audiences.

I am also unsure how to feel about reviewers criticizing the game becoming more platform-heavy as opposed to speed later on, because (at least for some purists) I recall complaints about Mania being too automated, and that some of the people who got to play the game early were making level design comparisons to Advance 2 (the Speed Jungle level wasn't helping matters on that front). And I've been a champion of being sick of Sonic games focusing so much on speed at the expense of everything else.

Meanwhile, all of the critiques about co-op being completely unfitting and the soundtrack being wildly inconsistent completely unfaze me. Both of these design choices could had easily been addressed in early production stages (co-op isn't working, scrap it; appoint Lopes or literally anybody else but Senoue the sound director) but they chose not to. Their loss.

 

Battle mode mix:

 

It's almost as if metacritic and reviews are too subjective and inconsistent and the only real way to know if a game is worth your money is to follow individual players you trust and form a consensus from that. You don't buy a house or a car in the real world without doing a 'lot' of informed research, if you're smart. Buying games should honestly be the same given how many broken titles release at launch now.

Critics were means to be a trusted specific person giving their 'informed' opinion (as in, you trust them because of their proven prior knowledge), not a corporate outlet throwing random people at a game and giving a wildly different, subjective view.

This is why content creator and individual reviews will always be much better at helping you make a financial decision that metacritic and corporate owned publishers ever will.

 

On the contrary, I'd argue that most of the Sonic games over the past handful of years (starting with the release of the Nintendo Switch) have consistently scored within the 70 metascore range. Mania [Plus] and Forces are the outliers as the summit and the valley.

Superstars (currently) - 74 (Metacritic) / 74 (OpenCritic)
Origins Plus - 78 / 73
Frontiers - 71 / 71
Origins - 78 / 77
Colors Ultimate - 74 / 74
Team Sonic Racing - 72 / 74

 

Well consider me floored that TSR and particularly Colours Ultimate scored that high. TSR suffers from a dirth of content and we need no remind of how absolutely broken Colours was on release (something which was never truly rectified). Colours in particular does not deserve that 7/10. 5, tops.

 

Colors Ultimate was carried by the quality of the original game. Also, most reviews are of the PS5 version, which has the fewest glitches, and it's possible to basically never run into most of them. The Switch version, though, reviewed much worse.